The Clinton-Canada connection: Hillary Clinton coming to Vancouver

Bill and Hillary Clinton have made Vancouver, B.C., their West Coast ATM machine since the 42nd president used the Canadian city to host two international summits.

Hillary Clinton is coming to Vancouver on March 5 to speak before the Vancouver Board of Trade Women’s Leadership Council, in what the board is billing as the biggest even in its 126-year history.

Ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: He’s coming to Vancouver, following family tradition of picking up big speaking fees in the Canadian city.

Bill Clinton might take umbrage. He talked to the Vancouver Board of Trade in 2010, wowing the crows with talk of climate change despite the host group’s long promotion of coal and gas development in Canada’s western province.

Bill Clinton picked up another honorarium from the Board of Trade in 2007.

Iain Black, CEO of the Vancouver Board of Trade, treated the upcoming Hillary Clinton visit as an affirmation of his city. “I think it’s a strong testimony to the fact . . . that we’re an internationally recognized city,” Black told The Province.

The hosts would not disclose to the Province how much they are paying the former Secretary of State. The Clintons do not come cheap. Hillary Clinton is believed to command a $200,000-plus speaking fee, the equal of her husband and more than former President George W. Bush.

Tickets to hear the former first lady, and possible 45th president, will go for $129-399 for Vancouver Board of Trade members, the same tariff charged to hear Bill Clinton in 2010. The general public will be charged $199-520 (Canadian).

The Clintons have come to love Vancouver since they took a quick getaway — one of the last times in their lives they would go unrecognized — after the 1991 National Governors Association meeting in Seattle.

Bill Clinton used such venues as the magnificent UBC Museum of Anthropology for his 1993 summit with a well-lubricated Russian President Boris Yeltsin. (Yeltsin was indisposed at the end of the summit, so Clinton took over briefing the Russian press.) He was back four years later, and back out at the University of British Columbia, for a summit of Asia-Pacific nations.

The former president was back in Vancouver for a six-figure paying gig within months of leaving office in 2001. He has also played the provinces, giving speeches in Kelowna and Victoria.

Frank Gustra, a Vancouver-based global financier and philanthropist, has donated millions to the Clinton Foundation. In turn, Bill Clinton served as a rainmaker for Gustra, accompanying the Vancouver businessman on a 2005 trip to Kazakhstan in which Gustra landed a lucrative uranium-mining deal.

Other global politicians have helped affirm Vancouver as an internationally recognized city.

Ex-Vice President Dick Cheney spoke at the Vancouver Club in 2011, but not before a member of Canada’s parliament sought to get him barred from the country.

Vancouver billionaire Jimmy Pattison has hosted such luminaries as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and ex-President Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush at an annual meeting of managers from his business empire. Ex-New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani picked up a high five-figure fee and denounced Vancouver’s safe injection center for drug addicts.

Bill Clinton has generally performed solo in Vancouver. This will be the missus’ first gig in Western Canada.

“She’s a woman who has lived such an extraordinary life: From a lawyer in Arkansas, to becoming first lady, senator and secretary of state, I would love to be able to sit beside her and just get her talking,” Black told the Province.